My favourite Hitchcock film: Rebecca by Bidisha | Film | The Observer

My favourite Hitchcock film: Rebecca by Bidisha | Film | The Observer:

In Rebecca, Joan Fontaine is heartbreaking and hilarious as a twitchy waste of space with no personality, no self-esteem, no money, no friends and a cracking Electra complex.

Adapted from the Daphne du Maurier novel, Rebecca won the 1940 Oscar for best picture and preserves the novel's famous first line: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again". Hitchcock lifts the story out of du Maurier's dark, obsessive claustrophobia and presents a riveting satire about the toxicity of the gentility. Fontaine's character has married widower Maxim de Winter and moved to his ancestral home. She stumbles around Manderley like a temp on her first day at an investment bank, mortified, confused, intimidated by the legacy of her predecessor, Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, who's said to have died in a boating accident.

There are vivid female characters such as shrewd society woman Edythe van Hopper (Florence Bates) and Maxim's bossy sister Beatrice (Gladys Cooper), but best is housekeeper Mrs Danvers, played by Judith Anderson, a gliding serpent of scorn with a Viking crown of braided black hair, an archetype ripe for parody, imitation and comic inversion.